The Tylenol Mafia by Scott Bartz Read Free Book Online Page B

public relations efforts focused on eliminating any suspicion that the tamperings may have occurred at the McNeil manufacturing plants. “Only if company officials were able to disprove the theory of in-plant tampering could they be sure the act of terrorism hadn’t happened on their watch,” explained Foster.
    “In the beginning, they thought maybe the product had been poisoned [at the McNeil plant], “when in fact it turned out that because each lot has a [unique] number, the lot numbers in Chicago were traced back to Pennsylvania,” Foster later recalled. “But very soon thereafter, a lot number from Texas showed up, and that told us that this [Tylenol] could not have been poisoned at the factory.”
    “Any plotter would have to have dumped huge amounts of the poisonous salt into the production process for it to end up in such a high concentration in capsules on drugstore shelves,” remarked Foster. “It was done outside the factory, and one of the engineers figured out that if it were to be poisoned at the factory, that the way these things were made in huge vats, mixed, and used in huge vats, that it would take a half ton of cyanide to do that and it was totally impractical,” said Foster.
    A coordinated effort by multiple employees to poison Tylenol capsules at two separate plants was improbable, giving some support to Burke’s decision not to recall all Tylenol capsules nationwide. Yet the fact that the adulterated Tylenol capsules had been manufactured in two different plants was, according to David Collins, exactly what led J&J to expand the Tylenol recall to include all 171,000 bottles of Extra Strength Tylenol capsules from Lot 1910MD. With this second recall, J&J had now recalled 264,000 bottles of Extra Strength Tylenol capsules, representing 2.4 percent of the 11 million bottles of Tylenol capsules in the distribution system, retail stores, and hospitals.
    Marshall Molloy said McNeil supplied Extra Strength Tylenol from plants in both Round Rock and Fort Washington to “100 or so” wholesale distributors in the Chicago area market. But McNeil did not ship Tylenol to those “100 or so” wholesalers directly from the McNeil manufacturing plants. The Tylenol was instead shipped to the wholesalers from one of J&J’s regional distribution centers. In 1982, Johnson & Johnson operated eleven regional distribution centers – a fact that the company’s executives never mentioned publicly. These distribution centers were, however, referenced in a 1983 Harvard Business School case study used still today to teach college students about the dynamics involved in Johnson & Johnson’s decision in September 1982 to centralize its order fulfillment and sales and logistics operations.
    In February 1986, J&J spokesperson Robert Kniffin said Tylenol was distributed through three J&J regional distribution centers located in Montgomeryville, Pennsylvania; Round Rock, Texas; and Glendale, California. These same three distribution centers also handled the distribution of Tylenol in 1982 – a fact confirmed by several Department of Defense (DOD) contracts retrieved from the National Archives database. The DOD entered into contracts with McNeil between 1977 and 1983 to buy Tylenol products from the J&J facilities in Round Rock, Glendale, Montgomeryville, and Fort Washington.
    The McNeil manufacturing plants in Fort Washington and Round Rock shipped Tylenol to J&J’s Montgomeryville facility for distribution to warehouses located primarily east of the Mississippi River. J&J’s regional distribution centers in Round Rock and Glendale received Tylenol from McNeil’s manufacturing plant in Round Rock for distribution to wholesalers located west of the Mississippi River. J&J’s regional distribution centers shipped the Tylenol to third party distributers. These third party distributors then shipped the Tylenol to secondary distributors and institutional and retail buyers.
    Prior to the Tylenol murders, most Americans